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Does Professional Gaming Have a Future?
mr_sifter writes "Three years ago, celebrity gamers such as Fatal1ty were bagging millions in prizes, and TV channels were queuing up to broadcast games on TV. Professional gaming looked set for the big time. It never happened, and in the current economic crisis, sponsors and media organizations are cutting costs, resulting in the closure of many pro gaming competitions (as we recently discussed) and a down-scaling in prize money. This feature looks at whether pro gaming can bounce back, and whether it will always be a PC sport, or if pro gaming on consoles is the future."
It's just a marketing tool by PR companies. As soon as they find a better way to sell games, they'll drop it like a hot brick.
... pro gaming. While you have places like Korea and starcraft, it's not the norm anywhere else.
I remember many startups like "Online athletes" years ago (defunct now) trying to create a "pro gaming" site and pay gamers for winning games, the y failed horribly.
Also there is a problem with pro gaming - the games keep changing and you can't do real "pro gaming" online because of cheaters and hackers, so you can't be sure the people you're playing against are "clean".
Gaming is also not like other sports where you stick to one game and then build an audience around that game around those rules. In the video game world everything is constantly changing.
One of my best friends plays at the WCG every year and would always be in the top 10 players but he never made any real money on it, he won prizes like computer hardware, etc. But I think it will take a leap forward in culture and technology before eSports takes off (a generation or so) when gaming is seen as something normal that most everybody does, and technology has advanced to allow more activity... in which Nintendo's Wii will be seen as just one of the first attempts.
Many competitive sports games can be really fun to watch but only if the camera work is done intelligently. Things like Orange Smoothie/other mods for Quake 3, etc, allowed people to stream live matches to the web so people could watch the match, truth be told... not all video games are exciting to watch, and this has to do with the lack designing the game and the games systems to do what traditional camera's do for televised sports.
No.
Long answer:
No, not really, outside of Korea anyway. But they eat dogs.
A little background about myself: I spent the better part of my teens and early 20's playing at a high competitive level in games like Quake and Counter-Strike. I've won semi-major events; I was even on a few teams with notable CPL/WCG winners. You could say that I was right on the cusp of becoming a pro gamer.
There are a few reasons that I didn't go "pro" like a budding career and the fact that only the very cream of the crop players actually made enough money at the time to consider pro gaming a worthwhile endeavor. I knew I wasn't the best player around, and carting myself around to places like the CPL to finish in the bottom half of the top 10 or top 5 didn't make any sense to me. Working a steady job and earning a living from 9-5, 5 days a week, did.
Back then, I watched a lot of demos of other players and teams. You know what? I hated it. It felt like homework to me. When I attended lans, I rarely watched or was interested in spectating matches.
Why? Because gaming, especially at the highest levels, is way more fun when you are actually playing. Gaming, to me, is all about the adrenaline rush that you get when you're storming a base, or grabbing quad damage, or fighting back to win a round when it's 1v3. Spectating, to me, is for losers. Spectating is what I did back in high school when I lost a round of Street Fighter II and had to sit and wait for my turn in a rotation of friends.
I have probably said it here before, but it bears repeating. Pro gaming relies on sponsorship which, in turn, relies on spectators. And gaming is a is a poor spectator 'sport', or at the best, a niche market.